GNU/Solaris - dead in the water?

The declaration by Linus Torvalds and other kernel developers that the Linux kernel will stay under its existing licence - the second version of the General Public License - and the talk being floated by Sun Microsystems that it likes the upcoming third revision of the GPL have led to much speculation that an official version of GNU/Solaris would arrive by the end of the year under the GPLv3.

But this has now been shot down by the community advisory board (governing board) of the OpenSolaris project which has recommended that OpenSolaris stay under its existing licence, the Common Development and Distribution License, and not be dual-licensed. OpenSolaris is the project under which Sun released a subset of the source code for its Solaris operating system.

The starchy nature of the project is seen in the language used in this determination: "GPL licensing OpenSolaris would be yielding to a small vocal minority of FOSS developers who use the lack of GPL licensing, purely as a means of fostering FUD towards OpenSolaris and who will, in all likelyhood (sic), find some other workable mechanism to continue to foster FUD towards the project."